Mark Tooley has an excellent write up over at FrontPage about religious left figures staging martyr like arrests in defense of tax increases, unsustainable deficit spending, and the welfare state. Here are some details provided by Tooley:

Religious Left officials on July 28 successfully sought arrest for “faithful civil disobedience” in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda to protest any consideration of limits on the Welfare and Entitlement State. They were also demanding tax increases. Unlike more courageous and spiritually insightful fellow believers imprisoned in Iran, China, and North Korea, these U.S. activist prelates were presumably arrested, booked, bonded and released back to their nearby air-conditioned offices in time for posting fresh news releases.

Arrestees included United Methodism’s chief lobbyist Jim Winkler; former United Church of Christ President Paul Sherry; and multi-faceted Bob Edgar, himself an ordained United Methodist, former NCC general secretary, former Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania, and now chief of the liberal advocacy group Common Cause, the secular chief organizer of the “prayer” witness at the U.S. Capitol.

In a previous post, I pointed out the fact that just one example of government becoming so mammoth is that it now has self-appointed clergy over a flock of bureaucracy. They are declaring the bureaucracy sacred. Tooley’s use of “photo-Op” and “martyrdom” in the title of the piece is entirely appropriate and fully exposes the sadness and hollowness of staging civil disobedience for a broken and bankrupt bureaucracy.

For these mostly white and aging baby boomers, trying to recreate the courage of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s is foremost. However, it will never be actualized by defending a broken system and by looking to the failed policies of the past. One of the strengths of Dr. Martin Luther King was borrowing from the richness of the American narrative history of freedom and Scripture and using it to expose the weakness of a bankrupt system of injustice that was of the past. Bankrupt is bankrupt.

At least from their perspective, these budget busting pastors will keep evangelizing and suffering for more government as faithfully as those who toil for the souls of the lost in mission fields.